THE STREET ONCE KNOWN as The Causeway, which then adopted the name of a popular tavern, is getting a facelift.
The Roebuck Street Revitalisation Plan has already seen some improvements done to a few of the iconic buildings on the thoroughfare. Roebuck Street dates back to the early 1650s. 
Sir Trevor Carmichael, a member of the Roebuck Street Redevelopment Trust and the chairman of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society, said while the project was “still very much in the planning stages”, restoration work had begun on the Police Sports Club building at Weymouth.
“We have, should we say, the book ends of our National Hero Sir Garry [Sobers] which is posted there which act as an inspiration to young people and old people as well, as they pass and see his many exploits and development, and the importance he ascribes to courage and to hope, which are things we are adopting as we work with Roebuck Street,” he told Heather-Lynn’s Habitat.
“We are working on the monument close to the Central Bank where Parliament first sat, and we have one property which has been acquired through someone sympathetic to what we are doing,” Sir Trevor added, revealing that building was to the east of the Roebuck Street entrance of Harrison College.
Describing it as the “most iconic building with an overhanging balcony”, he said: “That building is going to be fully taken back to Roebuck Street of yore and it will be the landmark going forward.”
The monument at Roebuck Street which commemorates where Parliament first met in June 1639.
The committee member, however, stressed that restoring did not mean slavishly recreating what was there, but was about having a representative view. It also meant the Trust has had to work with the occupants and owners of the buildings on Roebuck Street.
“It is a total involvement project and, yes, we have got 100 per cent support [from the occupants and owners]. There are a lot other areas that do not seem obvious but people are tidying up their surroundings because they recognise there is a force of activity and they want to be a part of that force.”
When asked as how the Trust could prevent the kind of destruction that was done to the 1850s DeFreitas Shop (obliquely opposite Sugar Cane Mall) which once exhibited the traditional five-door façade but had been turned into a nondescript one-storey building, Sir Trevor admitted that preventing such things from happening was generally “not as easy as making sure that things happen”.
“I like to think of it in terms of making things happen because in making things happen, that is generally the best recipe for preventing things from happening the way they shouldn’t.”
He praised fellow members of the Trust, led by executive trustee Charles Holder, whom he described as not only committed but skilled.